Cured Meat

As turnips do so well with orange, it is only a small step to use them with marmalade. Duck has this affinity too, so the three can come together successfully in a darkly sweet and rich casserole. Like duck à l’orange but sweeter and more suitable for a freezing winter’s day. The orange flavors here, from both fruit and bitter marmalade, should not dominate. The final flavor can be tweaked to your taste at the end with lemon juice or, better still, a bitter Seville orange. Rice, pure and white, would be my first choice of accompaniment. If you start this dish the day before, you will have a better chance of removing most of the fat that floats to the surface.

Whereas most meats give us a choice of cooking on the bone or not, wild rabbit is one that really needs its bones if it is not to be dry. It is not the meatiest of choices, so you need to be generous with quantities here. Rabbit bones are small, and it’s important to watch out for the tinier ones. The turnips in this provide all the carbs you need to soak up the sauce. It just needs some purple sprouting broccoli on the side.

I ate this rather soothing way with lettuce twice last week, once for lunch, accompanied by a piece of salmon, the second time for supper, with nothing but a hunk of soft farmhouse bread, the sort with a dusting of white flour on top. Light, juicy, and clean tasting.

The fry-up has always appealed to me, in particular the bits that stay put at the bottom of the pan, the crusty scrapings that brown rather too much. I call them “the pan-stickings.” One of potato and duck fat is a deep-winter supper of immense pleasure; another of herb-speckled sausage meat and zucchini. This is robust cooking, crisp edged and flecked black and gold. It is not for those days when you want something genteel or elegant. This is the sort of supper to pile on a plate and eat with a cold beer. The latest of my fry-ups is extraordinary in that two generally sweet ingredients come together to produce a deeply savory result. The key here is not to move the ingredients around the pan too much, letting them take on a sticky crust while allowing them to soften to a point where you can squash them with little or no pressure. The caraway seeds, which people tend to either love or hate, are entirely optional.

There is much comfort, warmth, solace, and satiety in a bowl of starch, especially in cold weather. This one has the benefit of stock too, providing either a simple supper or an accompaniment to a roast.

Young potatoes of any sort roast sweetly, especially if scrubbed hard so their skin almost disappears and they are allowed to develop a sticky, golden coating in the oven. They need a few minutes in boiling water before they hit the oven if they are not to toughen as they roast. I match them with robust ingredients—slices of fat-flecked salami or perhaps a spoonful of softly fibrous pork rillettes—as a Saturday lunch.

Anyone who has shelled a bag of peas will know how good they are raw. Far too little is made of their scrunchy sweetness, and I put forward the pod-fresh raw pea as an idea to throw into salads of pale yellow butterhead lettuce, cracked wheat, or dishes of cooked fava beans. They work in their uncooked state only when very young and small. Old peas are mealy and sour. One rainy lunchtime in June, I put them into a simple salad of Peter Rabbit lettuce, crisply cooked smoked bacon, and hand-torn ciabatta. The result—restrained, refreshing, and somehow quintessentially English.

One of those soups that doubles as a main course, earthy, filling, and beefy. The soup relies on the onion to add depth and body.

Like asparagus, leeks produce a particularly subtle risotto. The crucial point is not to let them color. Cook them over low heat, with a lid on if you wish, or maybe with a piece of wax paper on top. Either way they must not brown.

In spring, the young leek is a welcome sight with its stick-thin body and compact green flags, particularly after the thick winter ones with their frozen cores. They are worth steaming and dressing with a mustardy vinaigrette or, as here, using as a base for a fava bean and bacon lunch. We sometimes have this in the garden, with inelegant hunks of bread and sweet Welsh butter.

Onions have always had a slightly awkward relationship with fish. They seem particularly ungainly and rough edged alongside the white varieties or shellfish. Shallots work better, with their milder notes and less significant dose of sugar, but of all the alliums it is the leek that marries most successfully. The white of the leek has an elegance and subtlety that is unlikely to overpower any fish you put it with. In a soup or pie, it dances with the piscine ingredients where an onion would tread on their toes. Chowder is traditionally a hearty bowl of food. The one I make with mussels and bacon is a short step away from the big clam and potato numbers I have eaten in Boston, in that it is somewhat lighter and less creamy, but it is still essentially a big soup for a cool day.

The soup-stew, a bowl of spoon-tender meat, beans, and aromatics that partly collapse into the surrounding stock, is one of the suppers I hold dearest. More often taken as lunch, this is food that feeds the soul as much as the belly, enriching, calming, quietly energizing. This is the cooking on which to lavish the cheapest cuts going, the fatty, bony lumps that butchers sell at reduced prices: mostly cuts from the neck and lower legs. Ingredients whose sole purpose is to give body to the liquid in which they cook. A knuckle end of prosciutto would be a sound addition here, if your local deli will sell you one. Most will charge very little. Butchers are an excellent source of ham bones with much meat attached. Failing that, I use a lump of ham, complete with its thick layer of fat.

A fantastic little recipe, cheap, simple, and fast. I usually have some bread with this, if only to rub round the plate afterwards. This is best on very hot plates.

“Monday cold cuts” is a key dish in our house: it shows our intent to use every scrap, to make the most of what we have, but it also gives me a break. It is one meal I don’t have to think about other than sharpening the carving knife. The appearance of thin slices of cold meat on the first day of the week also gives me a chance to consider a side dish more interesting than a baked potato. Sometimes I bring out a bubble and squeak, fried in my old cast-iron pan, or some leftover mashed root vegetables warmed in a bowl over hot water with a tablespoon of butter; other times it’s red cabbage, shredded with pickled walnuts as black as coal. Another favorite is a warm salad of some sort of root vegetable, fried or steamed, then turned in a mustardy dressing.

I was wary of the idea of eating the pods until I grew my own beans; young vegetables tempt in a way that full-sized specimens often don’t. The recipe is only worth doing when you can get your hands on unblemished beans without the cotton-wool lining to their pods and no longer than a middle finger. If you can catch them at this point in their lives, then you can eat them whole, like mangetout (snow peas). Serve warm, with thick pieces of bread or as a side dish for roast lamb or cold ham.

On the right day, a deep bowl of lentil soup is all the food I need. The homey, almost spare quality satisfies me in a way fancier recipes cannot. The undertones of frugality, poverty even, are avoided by rich seasonings of unsmoked bacon, herbs, and good stock. The backbone of earthiness is given a fresh top note with mint and lemon juice. You can keep your beef Wellington.

Pheasant and celery get on rather well. I sometimes put thick ribs in with the aromatics for a pot-roast bird, and have included shredded celery in a salad of cold pheasant with Little Gem lettuce and walnuts. Celery root seems to be one of the most successful mashes to serve with the mildly gamey flesh of this bird (parsnip is good, too).

As much as I appreciate the traditional rendition of the sort of celery root rémoulade you might get in a Parisian brasserie, I also like to shake it up a bit. Including the ham, or even bacon, in the salad rather than serving it alongside gives the meat a while to get to know the other ingredients, becoming more than just an accompaniment. An alternative to bacon would be shreds of smoked venison or prosciutto, or maybe smoked mackerel. Radish sprouts are stunningly colored sprouted seeds with a spicy heat. Enterprising natural food shops and supermarkets have them, or you can sprout your own in a salad sprouter. If they evade you, you could use any sprouted seed here.

Raw cabbage, especially the tight, white variety, would be good here if the idea of raw sprouts doesn’t grab you.